from a successfuly conducted video conference are the very kind which will do wonders to differentiate you from the competition and leave a positive experience in your customer's mind.

The following analysis is meant to equip an executive decision maker with the details they need to know to be able to make effective decisions about high definition (HD) video conferencing projects within the firm.

Adoption, accessibility and quality – are the most important attributes of successful video conferencing implementations.

Adoption: Video conferencing is a culture-changing capability. HD video conferencing is a fundamentally different experience than legacy video conferencing. To have rapid acceptance throughout the organization requires one or more executive sponsors determined to use it to help them do their jobs more effectively.

Like most performance-enhancing applications, executive sponsors act as opinion leaders and are best positioned to stimulate a shift in the organization’s practices. They can also provide feedback and user insights on the operational and support models used. 

The initial rollout of the HD video conferencing system should mimic the executive sponsors’ most frequent collaborations. For example, if it’s the global sales executive, implementing a video network design that equips that executive and their regional direct reports is a good start.

Scaling out from there to connect in their direct reports as their most frequent collaborations extends the network and makes the implementation more useful. In this way the value of the network can grow as more functions, more locations and more users are added.

Post-session processes such as emails and web popup surveys tied to the scheduling service can capture the value of trips avoided and deliver an important feedback channel to IT and the management team, such that the business effects of the whole implementation can be understood and experience-affecting problems quickly identi?ed and addressed.

Other process changes such as challenging employees when they make travel reservations with automatic questions such as ‘could the goals of the proposed travel be accomplished in an HD video conference?’ Even setting and then measuring the company’s carbon dioxide production and therefore reduction work to encourage adoption.

Still other organizations publish the quarterly or half-year travel expenses tallies of the top 100 travelers by spend. These systematic tools and reports are designed to leverage the common management premise - if you want to change behavior or some dimension of the business, measure it and report on it. 

Investment in HD video conferencing equipment and services needs to balance convenient access to the network of HD endpoints. Too few endpoints and you run the risk of frustrating users by establishing have and have not classes of employees, over taxing a limited resource and limiting the transformation of work collaboration styles to only a subset of the workforce. The Executive’s Guide to HD Video Conferencing 5 Adoption is about imbedding video conferencing into the corporate culture - making it part of the way of doing things. Accessibility puts a video conference within reach.

Quality meets or exceeds user expectations for experience. Concentrating HD video conferencing resources into a few conference rooms of the of?ce building introduces a degree of apartness and compartmentalization, making it easier for employees to avoid the service claiming too little convenience. Shared resources also leads to the need for complex scheduling software or services as part of a session orchestration capability. Greater accessibility leads to greater usage and both deeper and more frequent collaboration.

Brockmann & Company research has shown that the general rule of poor quality assuring poor consumption holds true. For many enterprises, HD is the most readily available option in terms of getting the most out of a limited budget. HD can also be a strong ?t in low capacity WANs since all but the most demanding telepresence rooms can be serviced with 1 Mbps Internet service.

Users’ expectations for high quality visual experiences have changed dramatically in the past few years because the home entertainment experience has changed. The transition of the presentation system from 19” vacuum tube TVs to 50” LCD panels, the transition of the media from VHS tapes to Blu-ray DVD and the transition of audio from built-in TV speakers to the comprehensive audio experience of Dolby 7.1 technologies has conditioned users to expect more from their audio-visual experience. Falling short of users’ quality expectations in today’s business environment has severe operational consequences – users just won’t use the service.

It is in leveraging these interdependent factors that your company can create and sustain an effective next-generation collaborative environment. And they are interdependent. Surely no executive will push to deploy a low-quality experience. And there’s no point in expecting big things from HD video conferencing if the service endpoints are only available in the CEO’s of?ce and one other location. All three factors - adoption, accessibility and quality - should be recognized and planned for in order to maximize the impact of the service.